Oedipus at Colonus

Oedipus at Colonus, the last work written by the great Athenian dramatist Sophocles (497-406 BC), was first produced at Athens a few years after the playwright’s death. The play depicts the last day in the life of Oedipus, once king of Thebes, who after years of wandering as a blind vagrant guided by his daughter Antigone, has reached Colonus on the outskirts of Athens. There he seeks a final resting place in a sacred grove of the Furies, offering the Athenians a divinely promised future security against their Theban neighbors if they will prevent him being forcibly carried back to Thebes. Throughout the play Oedipus reviews the tragic events of his own life—killing his father, marrying his mother, and fathering children with her—and passionately insists upon his own innocence. He also denounces Creon, the Theban ruler who forced him into exile, and scathingly repudiates his elder son Polyneices, who is about to attack Thebes. Then, in a fitting climax to his life of extraordinary suffering, Oedipus moves unaided into the heart of the grove and dies. 

This new translation by Ian Johnston is a fresh version of this famous work in a language that remains faithful to the original Greek and that offers the modern reader or performer an immediately accessible entry into a complex vision of the moral ambiguities at the heart of heroic conduct.